"Can you?" he asked urgently, in the candid tones of one seeking useful information.
There was a shadow of emphasis on the pronoun. She made no reply, and he went on:
"People's circumstances are so different I can imagine that you might face the idea of marriage as a mere interlude, because your life is so full, and holds so much else of love and fame and what not. Now in my case ... will you allow a lonely man the luxury of talking about himself for five minutes?"
"I am interested," said Melicent, quite politely.
"Well, you see, here am I, alone in the world. I can hardly remember my mother. I never had but one real friend—a man. I don't think I can remember a woman speaking one solitary kind word to me until I turned up in England with money. Now do you see, that friendless as I am, without human ties of kith or kin, what seems to you just a convenient arrangement, is to me the one possibility life offers? ... I wonder if you have ever thought what it must be to live altogether without intimacies, as I have done, for thirty years?"
There was a quiet, earnest simplicity in his voice which disarmed her. Suddenly she saw him in a new light. He was no longer the relentless pursuer, the man who hunted down a girl as his desired quarry. He was a lonely, heart-hungry fellow, who had been starving for kind words, thirsting for feminine sympathy. Seeing him in the light of what he had since become, she revolted from the memory of her own hardness. She had been the only English girl—the only creature with whom he felt affinity—in Slabbert's Poort. Among all the degradation and savagery of the place, he had stretched out appealing hands to the one woman who might have understood. And she had never given him one kind word! He said he could not remember one!
Without her own volition she felt her heart assailed with a rush of pity and tenderness wholly new in her self-centred, balanced experience. Without a word of reproach, with an almost bald simplicity, this man had opened the flood-gates of compassion. He had done more; made her ashamed of herself. She felt her face suffused with colour—she knew that her eyes swam with tears. The brilliant sun, facing them as they drove westward, almost blinded her. She felt she must say something; but the effect of his words had been so unexpected, so overwhelming, that she could not control her voice at once. At last, feeling that her lack of response must seem unkind, she faltered out:
"I—I am so sorry for you. I never guessed you were so—lonely!"
And to her rage and fury, her eyes over-brimmed and two tears—rare indeed with her—splashed down upon the rug that covered her knees.
Hubert made some kind of an inarticulate exclamation, and an abrupt movement, abruptly checked by the consciousness of the neatly apparelled back of Alfred, the groom, almost touching his own. He maintained complete silence for a long minute, then, bending towards Melicent: